Media and Tech Moguls’ ‘Rare Displays of Mortality’ Will Make You Feel Better About Your Mistakes

Weighted way-too-heavily with tech platform executives, journalists and media moguls, Vanity Fair’s New Establishment list (out today) is basically a who’s-who of people I idolize… But my favorite part of the list is how they recap their picks and in particular, an occasional category dubbed “RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY” which highlights one of their colossal missteps in 2017, instead of how they continued to dominate.

I’m a perfectionist. I’m an asshole to myself when I make mistakes. So it helped me a ton to read a laundry list of mistakes and embarrassments made by a usually infallible elite. They’re just like us! Here are some highlights:

Peter Thiel would have $6 billion if he hadn’t unloaded his Facebook stock soon after the IPO

Two of Shonda Rhimes‘s new shows were cancelled this year

The joke was on Stephen Colbert and Showtime’s Election Night Special when the election results upended the entire show

Remember when Mark Zuckerberg said it was “crazy” that Facebook might have swung the election?

Larry Page‘s own CFO is giving hell to his pet-projects like Fiber

Tim Cook helms a company about to be worth a trillion dollars… but his latest innovation is an Echo rip-off and their first original program was Planet of the Apps which one reviewer said “feels like something that was developed at a cocktail party”

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet/Google, made a $2.7-billion-dollar anti-trust mistake in the EU

The New York Times is firing hundreds of employees

Snap’s stock is down 40% and it was probably the most-anticipated IPO of the year

Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and DB Weiss announced their next project was about an alternate-history where the Confederates won the Civil War and it was naturally hosed into submission online

Head of Lucasfilm Kathleen Kennedy has had to fire 3 directors of Star Wars installments

Marc Andreessen has never hired a female partner at Andreessen Horowitz